


Jake: come up with a capital idea.

by Laylah



Series: Petstuck [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Adventure, First Meetings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 21:10:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you reach the excavation site, the university types are talking to the troll welfare chap—a serious fellow in a khaki uniform, holding a rifle. "Heavens," you say. "Is there a fugitive on the loose?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jake: live for adventure.

Good golly this is exciting. Your truck bounces and rattles up the narrow dirt road toward the turnoff, the morning sun glinting off your rearview. You've been looking forward to this opportunity all month—ever since you contacted the university about the site you found, and even more so once they got back to you to let you know that it was significant enough to investigate further. A lost piece of frontier history! And now you get to go visit and see what the experts are uncovering! You do hope you'll have time to poke around a good deal before the sun drops behind the mountains.

You pull in at the little washout on the side of the road that's become the staging area for the excavation. There are two university vans parked there, and also a truck from the local troll welfare department. What are _they_ doing here?

Well, the best way to find out is to go looking! You grab your hat off the passenger seat, pocket your keys and set off up the rocky incline into the woods. You've come up this way a few times before; you go hiking and climbing pretty much anywhere that isn't posted No Trespassing (and occasionally places that are, even though Jane tries and tries to discourage you—it's so hard to turn away from a challenging cliff face!). You know the trails the mule deer use, and you keep a sharp (hopeful) eye out for cougars, and you watch your footing even though you have good boots on because you can't be too careful of rattlers when the weather is warm.

You follow the path the excavation team marked on their way in, little pink tape flags on the black bark of pine trees, lurid enough to be visible in all sorts of weather. Already the trail is considerably more obvious than it was the first time you made your way out here, and they haven't even been on the site for long. It's amazing how much of an effect humans have on their environment sometimes.

When you reach the site, the university types are talking to the troll welfare chap—a serious fellow in a khaki uniform, holding a rifle. "Heavens," you say. "Is there a fugitive on the loose?"

The fellow gives you a grim nod, and the woman in charge of the excavation—Doctor Markey, if you're remembering correctly—tells you, "The site has been disturbed, and there are marks indicating we probably have a feral troll on the loose. Or, god forbid, a pack of them."

The troll welfare fellow shakes his head. "Doubt it's more than one," he says. "The leavings we've seen are consistent with a lone female defining her territory. Just have to see if we can flush her out—might need to bring dogs for that, but sometimes they come quietly if they haven't been out here long. They realize it's not all fun and games, being out here where nobody feeds you and there are bigger predators to worry about."

You try to curb your excitement. You've seen trolls before, of course, but there's something about the word _feral_ that makes this sound like a frightful adventure.

"She should be slow right now—sleeping, if we're lucky," the troll welfare fellow goes on. "When they go feral they tend to go back to a mostly nocturnal pattern pretty fast. Look for her where there's shelter, cover from the sun, and if you think you see her _don't get close_. She may want to defend her territory, and even if she doesn't, she could still do plenty of harm just trying to run. Let me be the one to actually handle her."

You nod, already scanning the site, wondering what this wild troll is like. Where did she come from? Is she entirely wild, or does she know how to speak like a human? What led her to come here? The site is the ruins of an old frontier fort, as best you could tell, detritus of a lost group of settlers who met an obscure and tragic end. You'd think there must be better shelter to be found elsewhere nearby, caves in the mountains that would keep her safe more thoroughly than the rotting remains of a long-fallen palisade.

The five of you—you, the troll welfare chap, and the three members of the university team—spread out across the site. It's probably not so large, as these things go, but you're still impressed with it; between the sparse trees you can make out the remains of the fortress wall, and there are hollows in the ground that would have been cellars when the buildings were still standing. A lot of the site is overgrown with scrub brush and young trees. You ask yourself: if I were a small nocturnal predator looking to den here, where would I hide?

You make your way through the brush, looking for hollows that would provide protection from the sun, or from casual passers-by. No luck in the first one, or the second, but the third time you peer into the shadows under a slump of collapsed rocks and the grays and browns resolve into a living shape: bare limbs, body covered in furs, a sort of makeshift hood where her brightly colored horns would give her away. You take a sharp breath, your heart pounding.

The troll's eyes snap open and fix straight on you, egg yolk yellow and rust red. She has her limbs coiled under her in an instant, already diving past you by the time you can yell for help. The hood flies back as she darts away: her hair is a tangle of long black braids, and her horns curl like a ram's.

She's quick and agile but when the welfare fellow's tranquilizer gun cracks she still stumbles. You can see her trying to reach the dart in her shoulder while she's still running, but she fumbles, her steps slowing, and before she's made it past the fort wall she's collapsed in a little heap.

Your heart is in your throat. You think you might have wanted her to escape, in the heat of the moment.

The welfare fellow is barking some nonsense at you about being careful as you walk toward the troll. She's out cold, no threat to anyone right at the moment, and you want a better look.

She's a lovely little thing. Probably she'd come up about to your shoulder, standing, and her bone structure has this kind of spareness to it that puts you in mind of a cheetah or a greyhound. She has broad cheekbones, with hollows under them that you suspect are a sign of hunger, and your heart aches for her, wild and alone out here.

The welfare fellow gets close enough to examine her, rolling her onto her back and prying an eyelid open, and you discover that she's belted her furs on with a scrap of red mountain climbing rope, and decorated the belt by hanging skulls from it. You can scarcely believe she's real.

"Nice clean capture, just the way we like them," the welfare fellow says. He shoulders his rifle and picks up the troll. She looks tiny in his arms. "I'll just be getting this little troublemaker back to town, then. Good luck with your digs! We'll probably hear all about it in the paper, won't we?"

"I certainly hope so," Doctor Markey says. "And thank you for coming out on such short notice. It'll make our jobs a lot easier to not have to worry about stumbling over an angry troll!"

The welfare chap takes his charge off down the trail, and you must admit you're a bit sorry to see him go so soon—you can practically hear Jane scolding you for your irresponsibility, but it would have been exciting to have it be trickier to find the troll. Still, there are all sorts of archaeological excitements to be had at the site, and soon enough you're engrossed in them, as Doctor Markey sketches out for you how the fort would have run, and what the remaining artifacts have to say about the men who built it.

And then, a few minutes later, the fellow trudges back into the clearing, with the troll nowhere to be seen. "Oh dear," Doctor Markey says, sounding far more distressed than you feel, "don't tell me she's escaped."

"No, ma'am," the welfare fellow says. "She's snug in the back of the truck, out like a light. Fan belt's busted, though, and I can't get any damned reception up here to call for help."

"Then allow me to offer my assistance," you say. "I can give you a lift back to town."

The fellow frowns a bit. "Even with the troll?" he asks. "Don't want to leave her in the back of the truck long enough for me to head down to town and back again, not with the way it's heating up already."

"No, certainly not," you agree. "That would be inhumane! We could buckle her up in the cab of my truck, couldn't we? There's room."

"Could do," the fellow agrees, nodding slowly. "And I'd much appreciate it."

"Think nothing of it," you says. "Lead the way, sir."

So he does. You trek back to the road and he removes the troll from the cage in the back of his truck, bundling her into the cab of yours. He puts cuffs on her, wrist and ankle, "in case of trouble," and you buckle her in. She seems much younger when she's unconscious; she's the size of a human child, and when she's not alert it's easy to see that resemblance instead of her own wildness.

Once she's secured, the welfare fellow fetches his gear and you pile into the truck yourselves, windows cranked down to let the air in because golly, it _is_ going to be a scorcher today. You're sure glad you were around to help out!

The troll stirs and starts to wake up before you're halfway down the mountain. She makes a little mewling noise at first, twisting and squirming in her seat. You're a bit worried about that, bracing yourself in case she tries to shove you while you're driving—but when she wakes up all the way she goes still instead of moving more. She sits up a little straighter. When you glance over, she's squinting against the sunlight, but she smiles brightly at you when she catches your eye. "Hi," she says. "If I ask where we're going, I'm going to be sorry, aren't I?"

You are utterly flummoxed, tongue-tied, trying to decide what to say—you feel like you should _apologize_ , good grief—and the troll welfare chap says, "Just into town. Do you have somebody who'll be missing you?"

She's chewing on her lip when you spare her another glance. "There isn't a terribly good answer to that, is there? If I say yes, you'll ship me back to somebody that I clearly didn't stick with. If I say no, you'll dump me in a cage somewhere so I can wait around for some other human to decide to take me home."

"Easiest if you tell the truth to start with," the fellow says. "Not here to make this hard for you, but you can't just be running around wild in someone's woods."

"Drat," the troll says with feeling. It's one of the most charming things you've ever heard. Her exasperated sigh is right up there, too. "No, I don't have a human anymore," she says. "He took me up in the mountains with him last fall. It was supposed to be a camping trip, but there was an accident. He fell."

"Good gravy, that's terrible," you say. "Must have been frightening."

"It was at first," she says. "Then I figured out how to hunt and find decent shelter and so on, and it got a lot easier."

You're grinning a bit at that. "Like a troll version of Robinson Crusoe," you say. "Or _My Side of the Mountain_ , I suppose."

"Did your owner have you chipped?" the welfare fellow asks. He doesn't seem nearly so thrilled by the idea of her adventures as you are.

She scrunches down in the seat. "Yes," she says.

"We'll look him up, then. We always get a few mishaps in outdoor season, and—wait." The fellow stops for a moment. "Last fall, hmm? You remember that guy they had to have a manhunt for, what was his name...."

You raise an eyebrow, glancing over at him over the troll's head even though you're going round a curve. "I can't remember his name for the life of me, but I know the one you mean," you say. "Brought in helicopters and police dogs and so forth. Too late when they found him, though."

The troll covers her mouth with her cuffed hands, so you can't rightly see what face she's making. Her eyes are very wide.

"I'm sorry," you say to her. Even if she didn't like the chap, that was a fairly beastly way of breaking the news. "That was frightfully insensitive of me." You glance at the welfare fellow. "What happens to a troll who's lost her human, anyway?"

"Once we've confirmed it, she goes into shelter custody," the fellow says. "We'll make sure her shots are up to date, probably give her a bath," you think he's grimacing at that bit, "and see if we can find her a new home. She's young, and she's pretty under all that grime, so it shouldn't be too hard."

She's also sinking progressively further down into the seat as the explanation goes on; she doesn't seem excited by the prospect of going back to civilization at all. (To be fair, you think, you never liked being dragged home from adventures for the sake of a bath either.)

"Or," she says abruptly, seizing your sleeve, "I could go with you!"

"What?" you say, because that's awfully sudden, and perhaps you stamp on the brake a bit harder than you meant to as you come down the next incline. "We barely know each other."

"That happens all the time, though," she says. "I'll make it worth your while."

"Here, now," the welfare fellow says, which is just as well, as it covers for your furious blushing and coughing fit. "None of that."

"Your friends back there were looking for things in the ruins, weren't they?" the troll goes on, heedless of her handler's complaints. You do admire her moxie quite a bit. "You'll need my help for the best bits. I've found them already."

You wish you weren't driving. You keep wanting to just drop everything and stare at her. "You've been digging up the old fort?"

"There were all sorts of interesting things there," she says. "And I took the best ones. There's coins, harness bits, I think some pieces of an old rifle." She hesitates a moment. "A couple of skulls, too."

The welfare fellow clears his throat. "You can't go holding those things hostage," he says.

You frown. "That's rather a harsh way of putting it, don't you think?" you say. "I think a bit of bargaining is a clever move for a girl in a tricky spot." You think of some of the movies you've seen. "Of course, if you try to get me to fall for any sort of booby traps, all bets are off!"

She _giggles_ , and goshdarn it you are actually thinking about whether you could give her a home. "I promise I'll disarm all the booby traps, just for you."

You're coming into town now, and the welfare fellow doesn't look like he approves at all, but it sounds like such a grand adventure. You have that ranch you inherited from your grandmother; there would be plenty of room there for a troll to run around, wouldn't there? "That sounds like an offer a gentleman couldn't refuse," you tell her. "You can call me Jake, by the way."

She grins at you and all of her teeth are sharp as the dickens and you don't mind a bit. "I'm Aradia," she says.

It's a lovely name.


	2. Aradia: bide your time.

The man from the troll welfare office doesn't like you at all. That's fair, though; you don't like him either. He keeps trying to convince Jake not to adopt you, claiming that you're far too much trouble for a first troll, saying they're going to need to keep you at the shelter for observation, pointing out that your owner might have next of kin who want you. You chew on your lip and knead your palms with your claws, trying not to argue with him. He clearly has _ideas_ about how trolls should behave, and talking back to humans does not put you in his good books.

Jake seems to be barely listening to him, though, so that's something. The three of you get down into town and go to the troll shelter, and then there's a stack of paperwork that Jake scribbles his name on while you cling to his belt and refuse to be dragged off in the back somewhere. The welfare people grimace at you but Jake blusters at them when they try to pull you away. You think you'll be able to handle him.

Eventually they agree to send you with him on a fostering basis—they're still threatening to track down your owner's family—and someone brings out a collar and leash to put on you. Your claws bite into your palms as hard as you can make them, but that way you can keep your face calm.

Jake takes the leash and brings you back outside with him, and you trot along obediently and don't let it pull tight even once. You aren't stupid enough to bolt when you're in town, even a small town like this. You know how to wait for an opportunity.

Outside it's gotten uncomfortably hot, and the sun is much too bright for you. You try not to let your discomfort show, watching Jake mess around with his phone, sending someone a message. All things considered, if you had to be caught and moved somewhere else, he's a tolerable person to do it. He might honestly be as harmless as he seems. You can see a thousand deaths for him, but so long as he doesn't force your hand, you don't need to let him know that.

"What is it?" he asks as he pockets his phone, cocking his head at much the same angle you have yours. "You look like you're pondering something dashed important."

You keep smiling. "You. You're either going to be lovely or terrible, and I'm trying to work out which."

He laughs. "Like the little girl in the rhyme," he says. " _There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very good indeed, but when she was bad, she was horrid_."

You reach up and tug a stray little bit of hair out of the very front of your braid, so it hangs in a loose curl over your forehead. You raise an eyebrow at him.

"I'll consider that my fair warning!" he says. He offers you his arm. "Shall we, madame?"

You take his arm like a human lady in a film, and he escorts you over to his truck. You wonder, a bit, if he's trying to make it feel less like he's dragging you around by a leash, and if so whether he's doing that for your sake or for his.

It's even hotter in the truck than outside, but you buckle yourself in—you're friendly and cooperative!—and Jake puts the window down on your side once he has the engine running. The moving air helps some.

"You must have had a frightful time of it," he says as he turns onto the highway to head back up the mountain. "Being up there on your own all winter."

You try to figure out how you ought to answer that. Does he want you to be grateful for the rescue? Is he looking for hints about how you managed? "It did get awfully cold," you say.

He just grins. "Wouldn't have been able to stand it, myself," he says. "I grew up in the South Pacific. By the time the mercury drops below sixty I'm plain miserable."

"I don't have any idea where that is," you tell him with a smile. "But I've never thought humans were really suited for cold weather."

"Not in the slightest," Jake agrees. "But we're dashed stubborn! Hate to be told there are things we can't do."

You swallow hard and don't let your smile drop. "Certainly not," you say.

He brings you back up the mountain and parks beside the broken troll welfare van again, and it's a good deal more difficult to not pull at the leash when you're up in the pine woods instead of in town. But you're not stupid. You don't want to choke yourself. You don't want to demonstrate that you're trouble when you don't have a good escape route ready.

"Gorgeous up here, isn't it?" Jake says as he strolls through the forest beside you. "Such wild country. And I hear there have been cougars sighted around here!"

"I never saw a cougar," you say, "but I ran into a bear once."

"A bear!" he says. From the tone of his voice it sounds like he's happy to take that as a substitute for a cougar. "What did you do?"

"I climbed a very tall tree," you say. "And waited a long time."

Jake laughs in delight. "I suppose it wouldn't have been terribly clever to punch the fellow, no matter what a good story it might have made afterward."

You smile back. "Pow!" you say, throwing a mock punch.

"Bam!" he agrees. You wonder if he's ever seen a bear anywhere but on television.

He does all the talking when you reach the site of the old fort. You're going to miss exploring here. It was so exciting, being able to dig up strange treasures in the dirt and try to figure out what they all meant together!

The human archaeologists think you're horrible for disturbing their site. You don't try to talk them out of it. You know they wouldn't listen to you anyway. You just wait, and when Jake prompts you to show him where your stash is, you nod cooperatively and chirp, "This way."

You lead Jake (and the other people you guess) further into the woods, up the side of the hill along that deer trail you'd been using. It makes you unhappy to have to pull aside all of your careful disguises bits and show them the way into your cave, but you don't really have much choice at this point. The humans flip on flashlights as they follow you.

Your finds are neatly laid out in rows, each row labeled with a little picture you drew to represent the category: a horse head where the harness bits go, a dollar sign for the coins, a pistol for the gun parts (even though they're probably not all from pistols). Some of them you're not totally sure of, but you put them in the categories that you thought made sense.

The lady in charge of the dig site coos over you as if you've done a shocking new trick. She doesn't pick up any of your finds, but starts taking notes on her clipboard instead. She asks you about each item, and you recite what you can remember about them. Jake smiles at you some more, looking proud.

"When everything's put together for the museum," he says, "we'll come take a look then, what do you say?"

"The museum does not generally allow animals," the lady in charge says. You close your eyes and picture her getting bitten by a rattlesnake. You tell yourself it's going to happen. You just won't be here to see it. But it'll happen, so you don't have to do anything to her now.

"I'm sure they'll make an exception for the young lady who took such good care of their new exhibit," Jake says blithely. He waves the woman's skepticism away. "But all that can wait! For now, we should be getting home, I believe."

You nod. "There isn't much more I can do here, after all." There's more you _could_ , do, details you could rack your brain for, things you could try to remember and spell out for the dig team. But you feel like you've done enough. You want to stop looking at the lady in charge now.

"All right, then," Jake says. "Doctor Markey, it was wonderful to have the chance to come visit the site today! I can't wait to see how everything turns out. Aradia, shall we?"

"Yes, please," you say.

You follow him back down the trail, keeping a little closer than you'd like so that the leash doesn't pull tight. He chatters all the way back to the truck, telling you about the archaeology team, about the first time he came up here and stumbled over the ruins ( _your_ ruins!), what the ranch he owns is like. At the truck he unlocks your side first.

When you climb in, the blast of hot air is almost more than you can stand. You flinch at it. "How far is it to your ranch, again?"

Jake shrugs. "About an hour and a half, I'd say. Maybe a little less, if we don't hit any traffic." He frowns. "You going to be all right traveling in the sun that long?"

"I might want a blanket to hide under," you say.

He smiles at you as if that was a charming thing to ask for. "I'm sure I can provide, madam."

The blanket he finds for you is a little scratchy, but you pull it over yourself anyway. You'd rather be too warm than squirming under the sunlight. "Thank you," you say, keeping yourself on his good side.

You don't remember much of the ride. You'd been sleeping when they found you in the first place, and now that the excitement of running has worn off, you're tired again. The heat of the truck and the darkness under the blanket make you drowsy, and you drift off as the truck rumbles down the road.

There's gravel crunching under the tires when you wake up again. You shift the blanket just enough to peer out from beneath it. You can see fences, a gray horse in the field beyond the nearest one, a squat little building beyond. Wide-open country, and you miss your woods already.

The truck rattles and bumps up to a stop at the end of the gravel road, and you push the blanket back from your face entirely. "Welcome to the ranch," Jake says to you, and you squint out the front of the truck. There's a big painted hanging sign with a picture of a long-horned skull on it, and words under that. There's a barn with a couple more horses standing around in front of it. There's a house, painted white and green, long and low to the ground.

Jake shuts off the truck and pops his door open. "Come on, then."

You _could_ bolt now, you think as you unbuckle your seatbelt and open your door. Your leash dangles from your throat as if he's forgotten about it. If you squint off into the distance, you think there's a tree line past the fields in one direction.

"I know I could use some lunch," Jake says, "and I'd bet you're probably hungry, too."

"You do know how to tempt a troll," you say to him.

He laughs, his head thrown back, light sparkling on his glasses. "Right this way, madam."

You follow him into the house.

It's definitely nice to be able to get out of the sun—it eases this tension behind your eyes that you hadn't really noticed developing. You breathe a little sigh of relief, and wander into the first room on your left to look around.

There's a couch and a big television, and three of the walls have posters on them that look like they must come from movies. Things with monsters, things with explosions, things with big tall buildings like you know they have in cities. The last wall has smaller pictures hung in frames, mostly pictures of Jake with other people: an old woman who looks like him, a young woman who looks like him but differently, a blond woman who is always laughing and leaning on somebody in the pictures, a blond man who always wears sunglasses and never smiles.

All the pictures look very wholesome, but your last house had pictures like that on the mantelpiece, too. It only takes a moment to pose nicely for the camera.

You turn away from the photos just as Jake appears in the doorway, holding out a plate with a sandwich on it. "Roast beef," he announces as he thrusts it toward you. "I'm no expert, but I believe you fellows are mostly carnivorous, aren't you?"

"Yes," you say, and take the plate. "Thank you."

"Feel free to have a look around the place," he says, waving to indicate 'the place' means the house in general. "And let me know if there's anything else you need."

He ducks back out of the room again. You sit down on the floor, put your plate in your lap, and eat the sandwich. It's odd, after killing your own food for most of the last year, to be eating this bloodless thing that came out of a package. But it's free food, and you're almost always hungry. You eat the whole thing, even the bits at the edges that are too-soft white bread without any meat in between.

Then you explore the house. You find the bathroom and the kitchen and another couch room, this one with a couple of big horned skulls hanging on the wall. You touch the little ones on your belt and wonder what Jake thinks of you wearing them.

You find him in his bedroom, sitting in front of his computer, typing away furiously. The computer pings back at him every few seconds. You come to see what he's doing, but it's just a bunch of words scrolling up the screen, some green and some orange.

"What are you doing?" you ask after a few seconds of watching.

"Tossing some ideas back and forth with my best bro, Dirk," Jake says. "He's the one in orange. He's been involved with troll rescue down in Houston for a few years."

You skip to the part of that statement that really arrested your attention. "Troll rescue?"

Jake nods, and attacks the keyboard again. "You know," he says, "the folks who take in trolls that have been treated badly, help them find better homes?"

"Oh," you say very softly. You didn't know. Nobody ever told you about troll rescue. You stare at the words moving up the screen, as if you'll just magically be able to read them if you wish hard enough.

"Anyway, I haven't been doing much with the ranch since I got it from Gran, and now you're here and in need of a home, and I suppose you can't be the only one in the state, so I figured...." He keeps going, explaining some plan he's come up with while he was bringing you here, connections and people to talk to and permits and things you don't understand, and then he finishes with, "So what do you think?"

You blink at him. "Sorry," you say, "I think I got a bit lost there."

He grins at you. "I do run on a bit when I get going!" he says. "My point was going to be, how would you like to help out? Dirk can give me all sorts of advice on the practical matters of getting a sanctuary up and running, but I'm going to want to make it a place where rescued trolls can be happy, not just out of danger! What do you think? You want to be my consultant there?"

"Yes," you say as soon as you can find your voice. It can't possibly be that simple. He wants to hear what would make you happy? He wants to help, and he actually means it? "Yes, I can do that."

"Capital," Jake says. He takes your hand and shakes it, just like you're both people. "Then the English Troll Sanctuary is in business."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Jake: come up with a capital idea. [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/526846) by [Opalsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalsong/pseuds/Opalsong)




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